An interesting article on the "90%" myth...

With all of the attention being focused on BATFE's disastrous Project Gunrunner,
this is a fairly decent article from STRATCOR:
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20110209-mexicos-gun-supply-and-90-percent-myth

Just for your perusal! Out of curiousity - does anyone know anything about the company sponsoring the article (STRATFOR)?

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svtruth

July 8, 2011, 10:42 AM

Good article.
Increasingly we hear that the Cartels are more heavily armed than the Police, with grenade launchers, full auto assault and battle rifles, etc. I'm betting you can't buy that stuff from Acme Guns, so it is not coming from US gun shops. It is likely to have been diverted from the Mexican, or other, military.

Tim the student

July 8, 2011, 12:24 PM

Stratfor has good stuff.

Cowtown Cody

July 8, 2011, 01:10 PM

Stratfor is an interesting company. George Friedman spends a fair amount of his time wrong when it comes to predicting things, so I don't tend to trust their judgments of what will happen next. But they do good analytical work on things that are in progress and they're good at avoiding ideological bias when doing so. That's a very solid article empirically.

Johnny_Come_Lately

July 8, 2011, 01:12 PM

It’s a shame, but we really don’t have NEWS anymore. Back in the days of Walter Cronkite, a news man was just that, they reported the news. They didn’t make the news, they were not beholden to anyone, nor would they be caught dead making political contributions. They simply reported the facts.

Now we have umpteen billion 24 hour so called news organizations. And without a doubt, but for a few exceptions, they can be classified as either conservative or liberal. Instead of reporting the news, now they create it. The article in question is just one more example.

It’s shameful that no mainstream press, no slight meant to STRATFOR, has called the anti’s on this propaganda. But, alas we don’t really have news anymore, just paid pundits arguing back and forth to make a point.

hso

July 8, 2011, 01:53 PM

http://nssf.org/share/images/MexicoChartBlog.gif

FIVETWOSEVEN

July 8, 2011, 02:02 PM

I believe most of the guns coming from us went to South America first, then were sold to the cartels by corrupt police officers etc.

MEXICO CITY - The most fearsome weapons wielded by Mexico's drug cartels enter the country from Central America, not the United States, according to U.S. diplomatic cables disseminated by WikiLeaks and published on Tuesday by La Jornada newspaper.

Items such as grenades and rocket-launchers are stolen from Central American armies and smuggled into Mexico via neighboring Guatemala, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City reported to Washington.

The assertions appear in embassy cables written after three bilateral conferences on arms trafficking that took place between March 2009 and January 2010 in Cuernavaca, Mexico; Phoenix; and Tapachula, Mexico, respectively.

....

La Jornada's publication of the cables follows revelations in the United States about a botched sting operation, "Fast and Furious," that saw members of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allow close to 2,000 weapons to be smuggled from Arizona to Mexico over 15 months.

Around 1,200 of the those guns were never tracked down by authorities, according to the Center for Public Integrity, a U.S. think-tank.

I think it was John Lott's son Maxim who wrote an article for Fox News, pointing out that "90%" traced to US sources of "20%" submitted for traces of the total is at most 18% of the total. The DOJ OIG implies that that the 80% not submitted for tracing are non-US origin, so Mexican officials saw no point in submitting them to ATF tracing. The latest Schumer-Fienstein press release claims that "70%" of the guns submitted for tracing actually trace to US origin, but that does not give the % of submitted for tracing relative to the total siezed. And no one wants to speak to the question of how many of those US origin weapons were supplied to Mexican military or police before they ended up in cartel hands. (And US weapons supplied to Central and South American governments are also showing up in Mexico.)

The US gun shops who cooperated with the ATF in Fast and Furious (and e-mails published by Sen. Grassley show at least one gun dealer openly expressing concerns to ATF hoping ATF was not allowing the guns across the border), cooperated with reservations. That aspect does not get much publicity, especially from Washington Post.

armoredman

July 8, 2011, 02:56 PM

I saw part of a National Geographic special, where a mexican policeman was holding a rifle, saying, "See, this is from US!" The rifle was a select fire M-203 with still attached grenade launcher.

Carl N. Brown

July 8, 2011, 02:58 PM

Back in the days of Walter Cronkite, a news man was just that, they reported the news. They didn’t make the news....

It has been obvious to me since the 1960s that (a) there is a school of advocacy journalism that seeks to "reform" the world not inform it by slanting news, and (b) that gun control is one of the causes being promoted by the news media. When Madison Avenue advertising exec Carl Bakal published his gun control book "(No) Right to Bear Arms" in the 1960s, the newspaper article about it hailed him as the Ralph Nader and his book as the "Unsafe at Any Speed" against the gun lobby. 1960s news reporting leading up to the 1968 Gun Control Act portrayed Sen Thomas Dodd as a heroic crusader and the National Rifle Association as villians, in shameless editorializing parading as news coverage.

svtruth

July 10, 2011, 01:00 PM

In fact, guns are extremely safe, when handled responsibly.
How many rounds a month do High Road members fire?
How many cause unintended damage or injury?
Jeff Cooper was surely present for more than a million firearm discharges and died peacefully at home of natural causes.
QED

jerkface11

July 10, 2011, 01:03 PM

The way fastnfurious looks I wouldn't doubt that the ATF is funneling the military hardware to the cartels too. Only two ways you can take that program. They were either trying to cause chaos in mexico so they could press for more gun control or they are trying to topple the mexican government.

Owen Sparks

July 10, 2011, 01:27 PM

How many of these 12% US made guns found their way to Mexico through surplus sales to South and Central American governments? For example, I remember back when all the police departments were switching over from revolvers to semi-autos that huge numbers of surplus revolvers were crated up and sold to to forign countries in order to keep them "off the streets" here here in the US.

jiminhobesound

July 10, 2011, 08:49 PM

I was in college when Cronktie was working. I had access to many news publications outside the mainstream and overseas publs. He was as biased and as editorial as the news readers of today.

dc.fireman

July 10, 2011, 10:04 PM

Nice graph work!

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